Yeah, you can find me on Facebook and Google Plus now

A couple of months ago, as I was working on my first book proposal, I began to face some of my demons. The names of those demons are Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. As I discussed in a previous post, I have a lot of reservations about participating in social media because of the ways that these “gated communities” of the internet try to control access and information.

But I am also a realist, and if you want to sell your book to a publisher these days you need to sell the idea that you are accessible and present, and that means being on as many social media platforms as possible. Perhaps really well-established (old) academics can convince a publisher to support a book based solely on the intellectual merit of their work, but of course that only works for folks who do not need social media in order to be known… and that’s clearly not me!

So back in late August I joined Twitter, which at the time seemed like the most innocuous of the three big social media outlets that I could join. Twitter seems pretty simple because what you can do on Twitter is really simple: you can tweet and you can read tweets, you can follow people’s tweets and they can follow yours. After spending a month and a half on Twitter, I now recognize that Twitter’s simplicity actually can lead to some pretty complex emergent dynamics. But so far those dynamics have been really positive for me. Just through checking and participating in Twitter at off times (my favorite being as I am held hostage by my young son, who likes to go to bed with a parent in the room) I have found myself better connected to scientific news. I have also made a lot of connections with other people interested in science, and have had a few great conversations.

Oh, yeah, and then there’s the boost in traffic to my website. I cannot deny it: social media really drives traffic. And although I wish that magically people just checked out my site without any other prompting, the reality is that tweeting out posts on my site has on several occasions created some huge spikes in the number of people that visit this site. That’s the conundrum, right? I work hard to create content that I present on my site, which exists outside of the gated communities of social media. But to get anyone to visit my internet outpost, I at least need to send smoke signals to these gated communities. One of the things that WordPress does really well is make sending these smoke signals to all the social media communities of your choice really easy (via the awesome Jetpack Plugin).

So I have gone to the next level by creating a Facebook profile and linking this site to my Google Plus page. Google Plus continues to mystify me, but I think I now know how to make posts on this site appear as posts on my Google Plus page… although what that has to do with “circles” and the like I am not so sure. Facebook is a total mystery to me, a monster I was happy to leave in its cage for over a decade now. I have zero interest in re-connecting with people via Facebook (if you are a long lost friend, just send me a message via my contact page, okay?), but I think that I have figured out how to make it impossible for people to ask me to be “friends”. Sorry Facebookians, but my profile is strictly for the following.

What’s next you ask? Instagram? Nah, too many words, not enough pictures from me to be on Instagram. Pintrest? Nah, not enough pictures of food and clothing from me to be on Pintrest. Tumblr? Maybe?! One of the ridiculous things about social media is that everyone has their own favorite platform, so if you want to reach “everyone”, you need to be everywhere. Man, I kind of miss relying solely on good old search engines…